


you best believe, boy, there's hell to pay

by misandrywitch



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Booker do you believe in God?, Family Dynamics, One Shot, all my favorite things, sad dads, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 11:08:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1224031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Standing on the deck of an airship, Elizabeth asks Booker a question. This is what goes through his mind between her words and his answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you best believe, boy, there's hell to pay

_“Booker, are you afraid of God?”_

You’re standing on the deck of an impossible airship in an impossible city, and an impossible girl is asking you an impossible question and you want to tell her to ask you something else, to stop looking at you at all because there isn’t any way you deserve it. The sky is slate, cold iron and gunpowder, smoke streaked across it from buildings on fire, and Elizabeth is looking at you with her hands hugging her own elbows and eyes like summer skies in Kansas in July.

No, you want to tell her, God is a joke. God is an invisible comedian who occasionally peers back the veil to have a good laugh at people like you. You’ve seen enough people choking out desperate last words, prayers and pleads and hosannas, around mouthfuls of blood and dying anyway. God doesn’t have much meaning to you anymore. Never really did.

You want to tell her about your mother, a strong-armed hard-hearted woman who wore a cross around her neck and the weight of one dead husband, two murdered brothers and three dead sons on her shoulders. Your uncles died in the Civil War. Your father never got used to living without a gun in his hand, and drank himself to death after the war was over. Your brothers got sick and died, because children died every day on the frontier. You, youngest and smallest, lived. You never did figure out quite how.  

She wanted you to believe in God and you tried to, for her. She went to her grave praying. You doubt you’ll have the decency.

You don’t want to tell her about the war, because for every day you manage to wake up without the smell of blood and dust in your nose there’s one where you’re convinced you’re still on that battlefield, watching your comrades get cut down, watching the women you killed bleed to death in the corn. The air in Columbia smells like that, thick and coppery, the whole city hovering on the edge of some huge precipice much bigger than the one below your feet.

You’ve never been a smart man, always better with your hands than your words. When they laughed at you, sixteen years old and sun-browned and scared, and said you looked like you weren’t all-white, you let your actions talk for you. When they called you a hero, you let the bottle speak instead. And when you opened your eyes and saw what you’d done, you didn’t have the words to ask anyone for forgiveness.

You couldn’t even think of what to say when you ran from the baptism. You just ran. You didn’t stop running after that.

It doesn’t feel like you’re running now, but that’s less to do with you and more to do with the girl in the blue dress, half messiah, half witch, naïve and braver than you’ve ever been.

The first time you saw Elizabeth, the split second between falling through the roof and getting hit over the head with a book, before you had your breath back and your head set on straight, you thought she was another girl you’d known a long time ago. You see her face sometimes in the faces of passing strangers, in young women with ribbons in their hair or in children playing in the park near your office in New York. For the past 20 years you’ve been followed by ghosts; dead men in uniform and dead women with braided hair, and one dark-haired little girl.

You want to tell Elizabeth about the only woman you’ve loved. She was dark-haired and smarter than you were, had a laugh like an foghorn, loved to dance. Her friends never knew what she was doing messing around with Booker Dewitt because you weren’t really handsome even at 19, but she didn’t care. You made her laugh. You loved her clumsily but wholeheartedly. You would have married her. Planned on it.

You cursed God when she died, and you stopped praying after that, turned your altar into a bottle and a deck of cards, wreathed in cigarette smoke instead of incense. You decided that if you were going to be a failure (and you were, you failed your daughter, your lover’s memory, failed the people you brutalized and your mother’s morals) you might as well go at it spectacularly. It was easier to throw yourself into failure than try to scrape something good out of what you’d been left behind. There are some hands you can’t win, you know this too well, and the hand God dealt you is a killer one. You just hold on to it, and hope you can pull something out of it before it’s all over, use all the trick you know and bet everything you’ve got. You did just that. You lost.

It would be nice to be able to blame God for this, lift the burden off your own shoulders and say ‘You did this to me, this is your fault because this is your plan.’ But you can’t. If God’s out there somewhere, protecting Columbia, leading Zachary Hale Comstock into the future, he doesn’t care at all about you. Your mistakes are your own.

You aren’t afraid of God because God’s judgment doesn’t mean anything to you. Booker Dewitt is his own judge, jury and executioner. Booker Dewitt has judged himself, and found himself wanting. Why should you care about good and evil when you can’t even reconcile that in yourself; your own life hasn’t mattered to you for a long, long time.

For twenty years, you’ve run. You’ve buried your memories with the job, and when the job didn’t work with the gambling, and when the gambling went badly with drink. You aren’t introspective, and you aren’t special, and the only things you’re good at are hurting people. You know your way around a brawl,  Mr. Dewitt. Ain’t that the truth. You’ve been beating yourself up too, since you were sixteen, and the only reason why you’ve never given in and died was because you feel you have to keep carrying your sins. Sisyphus has nothing on Booker Dewitt, carrying your burdens. Over and over and over again, you get to the top of the hill (or a city in the clouds) and then you fall back to the bottom of a bottle.

It doesn’t feel like you’re running now. You’re going forward, for the first time in a long time.

You made Elizabeth a promise. The first time you said it you didn’t mean it, but now you do. You aren’t good with promises but you’ll keep this one, even if you have to rip Columbia up from its foundations, even if you have to dig through its ashes. You’re going to keep her safe, and if you have to kill Zachary Comstock and his entire army to do it, if you get shot five times in the chest and repeat your promise through numb blood-stained lips, even if you pray to God in your last moments, then that’s the way it’ll be. This promise is real. This promise matters.

 

Here’s this girl who looks a little like your dead lover and reminds you of your daughter, who smacked you over the head with a book when she first saw you and not soon after trusts you with her life. You add her silently to the litany of women you have loved. It’s not a long list.

God doesn’t believe in you. Elizabeth does.

‘ _No, but I’m afraid of you.”_

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'bartholomew' by the silent comedy
> 
> shittybknights.tumblr.com


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